Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel

It’s always exciting to take a glimpse inside the minds of the fashion editors, writers and stylists who put together the magazines and curate the pages that readers want to pour over, buy into and, most recently, tweet about or pin up.

In 2009, The September Issue went behing the scenes at Vogue and examined the relationship between editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, and creative director, Grace Coddington. In the 2012 documentary, The Eye has to Travel, which I watched recently, the focus is on another Vogue tour de force, Diana Vreeland.

Vreeland wrote for Harper’s Bazaar for 30 years before taking the helm at a magazine that, at the time, was producing such groundbreaking imagery and fashion, Vogue, in 1963, before moving into exhibition curration in the 70s until her death in 1989.

Vreeland lived and breathed fashion, and one of the creatives she worked with commented that she would often tell models to ‘make an asset of their assets’ – towering girls would be put in heels and every quirk would be celebrated to the extreme. I love this idea and it fits in seamlessly with the way designers and photographers were pushing the creative boundaries of fashion at the time.

The documentary uses interviews with her peers and family, overlayed with her words from television appearances and interviews between Diana and her biographer, George Plimpton, who helped her write her memoir, D.V. David Bailey, Richard Avedon and Angelica Huston also make appearances, as do the covers and fashion stories that she helped to create.

I think the film was shown at the Watershed last year but if, like me, you didn’t get around to seeing it, it’s well worth renting or scouting out on Love Film Instant, which is where I found it. Not convinced? Take a look at The Eye Has to Travel trailer, below.